Author Archives: pat-gladics

8 days, 80+ river miles, 1 backpack, and some of Utah’s finest wilderness

By Pat Gladics | Published April 26, 2010

I first laid eyes on Desolation canyon when I picked up a guide book for hiking while I was driving through Utah in 2008.  I sat in my truck flipping through the guide book after buying it and remember seeing the authors pictures.  The pictures said it all.  That was where I wanted to go.  It took me a year and change to finally do it but it was worth the wait.  Below are a select few of the photos I took while hiking this amazing piece of ground.  I will try to give somewhat of a short narrative of my hike while letting photos fill you in on the rest. Day 1.

October 20th 2009.

The mouth of maverick canyon… Almost ran out of water today – If I have to hike north from here will first try along river.  If bad – abandon everything but water supplies for hike to 9 mile creek. “ Day 2.

Day two, my journal entry is below.

“ October 21st 2009 Across river from Peters Point.  Day 2 feeling far more successful than day 1… Pack still heavy at end of the day – navigated “problems 1 and 2” without much difficulty.  … READ MORE >

Posted in Mountains & Trails, Mystery Ranch Employees, Trip Reports | 5 Comments

Prescribed Fire

By Pat Gladics | Published July 14, 2009
Featuring: Hot TopHot3

It’s early may in region 3 (Arizona and New Mexico for all you non-forest service folks) – this is the time of year you usually see big wildfires around here.   It’s hot and dry.  The season has been unusually slow though, which is strange since region 3 had an extremely dry winter.  I was expecting to get the call to go somewhere – like the Coronado in southern Arizona (where temp’s are usually above 90 and erratic winds usually make for some big fires)  or the Gila.

So when we found out we were going to go do a prescribed burn up near Hatch I was more than a little surprised.  I was shocked when I heard we were only going to be there for 1 shift. Usually when a hotshot crew does a prescribed burn we are there from start to finish not just for a little piece of it.  I was told we would be there for black-line operations and they would bring a heli-torch in to light the rest.  Black-lining is a process by which a crew will light fire around the edge of a prescribed burn, making a buffer of burned fuels around the perimeter so … READ MORE >

Posted in Mystery Ranch Employees, Playing with Fire, Uncategorized, What's Hot | Tagged , | 5 Comments